Thus, Pakistan is not merely outing the name of our CIA station chief. They are also setting him up to be murdered, in the grand Islamist tradition of "I'll take this one step and let my jihadist buddies take the next, and then I'll claim I had nothing to do with any of it, and condemn the murder (slightly; with reservations, and fresh complaints about "occupying armies").

So this CIA chief will have to be evacuated ASAP, on threat of death.

To even call this "escalation" is a mistatement. Here's the series of actions so far:

Pakistan creates the Taliban in Afghanistan as a hyper-fundamentalist terrorist-friendly proxy government.

Pakistan supports the Taliban until they take over the country.

The Taliban, most likely with the go-ahead from Pakistan (its patron), invites Usama bin Ladin to live there, an offer he takes.

To get even with us for the outrage of protecting ourselves against their murderers, Pakistan outs our CIA station chief.

Anyone besides me notice in that series of actions it's almost entirely Pakistan that's killing and harming Americans? Seems to me we took three corrective actions -- to stop things that shouldn't have been going on in the first place -- and Pakistan gets even via another murderous provocation.

In a sign of how bad ties are between the two countries, Pakistani media on Saturday once again publicly named the CIA station chief in Islamabad, a breach of both protocol and trust, that is bound to enrage Washington.

A Pakistani TV channel and a newspaper considered mouthpieces of the country’s military said the ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had met CIA station chief Mark Carlton to protest US incursion into Abbottabad to kill al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. CIA station chiefs remain anonymous and unnamed in public although the host government is told.

Earlier, the Obama administration had asked Pakistan to disclose names of its top intelligence operatives to determine whether they had contact with Osama or his agents.

The latest breach indicates that a section of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment is determined to run the CIA out of the country fearing that the ISI’s links with terror groups and its sheltering of terrorist leaders will be exposed.

This is going to get very ugly. It will be bad for America, but it will be worse for Pakistan.

At some point, they can no longer be permitted to wage a coward's war on their own terms. If they want to ride the tiger, they should be made to ride the goddamned tiger.

But in the Meantime: Surely we have a list of their homosexual ISI agents and generals and fundamentalist clerics. And their adulterers and whoremongers and pedophiles and porn addicts.

Obama should deploy Alinksy's rule against our actual enemies and make them live up to their own rulebook.